This project examines the construction of subjectivity in Eleanor Antin's Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (fig. 1) and Chris Kraus's Aliens and Anorexia (fig. 2). These works inscribe the notions of self, social and subject through and on the body, addressing the interpolating poles of nutritional consumption and the body's “will to distance itself” through self-starvation. Throughout this essay, I will demonstrate how these artists engage with the spaces and discourses created around food and eating disorders to produce a counter-dominant vision of subjectivity, a thematic to which both artists regularly show interest throughout their careers. My readings give priority to theories of the body, subjectivity, consumption, gender and difference, refusing to see these works, or the practice of anorexia, as a simple testimony of the pressures exerted on the contemporary female body or the demonstration of a cardinal relationship between the feminine and food. Instead, it situates these practices as the site of complex and, at times, resistant subjectivities. At the heart of my reading are recent sociological and anthropological theories on the role of food in the construction and meaning of the subject and its relationship to the social and cultural order. My readings also incorporate psychoanalytic theories addressing the formation of subjectivity through prelibidinal encounters with subsistence. This range of theories is essential because the most complex discourses around food and anorexia resist reducing these concepts to matters of nature/nurture, inside/outside, or self/social. This perspective is not to say that eating disorders, eating and the like are primarily or naturally a female affair...... middle of article ...... the multiplicity of meanings embedded in these works suggests the importance of the body as a liminal site, a site of inscription and meaning-making, both in historical-contemporary work and in more recent feminist work. It is of course unlikely that Antin or Kraus would rely directly on any singular theory explained in this essay. However, both artists are undeniably interested in the formations, constructions and shifts of subjectivity. Carving: A Traditional Sculpture and Aliens and Anorexia address the uncontained boundaries of the body, exploding the Cartesian dual model of the inner/outer self. As feminist artists, Antin and Kraus are also surely aware of the complexity of discourses around food, the self, and the body. Even if artists do not speak “to” or “through” a particular theoretical model, they nevertheless contribute to these discourses..